In the right hands, Facebook’s advertising platform is a very effective marketing tool. For one, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains the biggest social network worldwide.

The enormous amounts of data Facebook collects, coupled with the platform’s machine learning capabilities, makes it extremely effective at predicting user behaviour online. If you are looking to put your audience at the heart of your campaign, then Facebook will certainly be a platform you want in your arsenal. But how can you, as a marketer, unlock that potential?

5 Facebook Ads Manager Tips for Better Results

This article will help you set up and run your Facebook campaigns effectively and more efficiently. From setting up and managing your audiences to tools that will make your life easier, here are five Facebook tips that will set you on the right tracks. These steps will also save you time, resources and help you fully utilise Facebook’s campaign optimisation.

Use Facebook’s Audience Insights Tool Before Setting Up Your Campaigns

Your audience is central to running a successful Facebook campaign. Therefore, it is essential to learn as much as possible about the people you want to reach before committing resources to your campaign.

Facebook’s Audience Insights tool allows you to do so through aggregated data about two groups of people – users who are already connected to your page and broader insights about all users on Facebook.

You can find Audience Insights by navigating to the drop-down menu in the top left-hand corner of your screen in Facebook Ads. Once you are there, you can start constructing your audience from one of the two sources available.

Based on the parameters you select, you will then be able to see a breakdown of age, gender, education levels, job titles, relationship statuses, pages liked, affinities and much more. For example, if you wanted to see a demographic breakdown for users interested in ‘Motorcycles’ in the UK, you’ll find that 74% of those users are men and most fall within the 25-34 age bracket (illustrated below).

As a result, instead of taking a long shot, you will now be able to make a more informed decision on where your budget is best spent.

Split Your Audiences Out into Different Ad Sets

After identifying your audiences, the best way to structure your campaign is to have an ad set for each unique audience. This is useful for the following two reasons:

  • You can target each unique audience with more relevant and tailored ads.
  • It allows for the automated optimisation of our overall budget based on how each audience performs (see Tip #3).

Campaign Budget Optimisation: Set Budget at Campaign Level

Now that your ad sets are split out, how do you use your budget effectively?

The best way to do it is to allocate an overarching budget at the campaign level and switching Campaign Budget optimisation (CBO) on. With CBO, your central budget is continuously distributed to the best performing ad set in real time.

So, for example, if you had 3 ad sets within a campaign, CBO might spend 70% of your budget on one ad set if that is the most effective way to spend it. By structuring your account this way, you will benefit from a reduced number of budgets that need to be manually managed.

Additionally, where possible, you should utilise CBO’s lifetime budget. When you set a lifetime budget, you are telling Facebook how much you are willing to spend over the entire runtime of your campaign or ad set. This will help with the management of your budgets in many ways, including:

  • Reduced time spent worrying about how your campaign is pacing
  • Secures you from the risk of overspending
  • You will be able to run ads on a schedule
  • Flexibility on how much you wish to spend on each day

Utilise Facebook’s Machine Learning

Thanks to machine learning, Facebook’s platform has become incredibly effective at predicting its users’ behaviours. As more and more users view or interact with your ads, Facebook’s models get better at predicting who is likely to convert. However, for the platform to optimise towards your goals effectively, there are some necessary steps to take at the Ad Set level.

When you set up a new ad set, you will need to select a goal for it to optimise towards. The ad set will then enter a learning phase where it will need to generate at least 50 optimisation events (the number of times an outcome is achieved by your ads) in a week.

Therefore, you need to choose an event that occurs frequently to exit the learning phase. For example, if you want to optimise towards ‘purchases’ but you know this event won’t occur frequently enough, consider using ‘add to cart’ in its place.

If that fails, there are other levers and dials at your disposal when your ad set has a limited learning status, such as:

  • Expanding your audience sizes to get more users in the funnel
  • Consolidating your ad sets or campaigns where possible
  • Increasing your budget

If you follow these steps, you will be able to unlock one of Facebook’s most valuable assets in automation.

Use Find and Replace

Once your campaigns are built and ticking over, tasks such as refreshing your ads and creatives will take up a lot of your time. This is especially true for bigger and more complex accounts. You could find yourself needing to change thousands of ads at once. Thankfully, Facebook has a real life-hack of a feature in its platform for just those sorts of tasks, the find and replace tool.

If you need to make broad changes at scale, such as a quarterly ad refresh, this tool will save you ample time. Simply select the ads or ad sets you want to edit, click the drop-down menu next to the ‘edit’ button and select ‘find and replace’ (circled below).

You will then be able to edit your ad names, URLs, headlines, and primary texts in bulk. Additionally, it can be a great tool to review and amend your ads. If you have misspelled a word or need something specific changed, these can be identified quickly.